


The Honeysuckle Bower: A Ballade

by DaisyNinjaGirl



Category: Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
Genre: F/M, Quiet, relationship building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:47:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21743236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaisyNinjaGirl/pseuds/DaisyNinjaGirl
Summary: …the pleachèd bowerWhere honeysuckles, ripened by the sun,Forbid the sun to enter, like favouritesMade proud by princes, that advance their prideAgainst the power that bred it.
Relationships: Beatrice & Benedick & Don Pedro (Much Ado About Nothing), Beatrice/Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 33
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Honeysuckle Bower: A Ballade

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LeBibish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeBibish/gifts).



**The First Stanza**

_…so I commit you—  
To the tuition of God: From my house, if I had it._

In the heights of Messina, nestled in the high hills among the pale green frocks of olive groves, rests a house built of paler stone, its door graced with a brace of lemon trees: the house of a gentleman. A rider cantered his horse up to it, pulled up his steed with a cheerful tug of the reins, and called “Halloo the house!”

A maid, her hair a tangle in the bright sunlight, opened the door to him. “Yes, rider?”

“Bring a message to your master: Don Pedro rides near, and bids a greeting.”

“I will note it to him, master, but note that the ruler of this house is under the sway of a greater prince than any worldly one.”

“Your house is host to a ruler greater than the Prince of Aragon, woman?”

“Aye. That is, a great one, and a hot one, and a heavy one.” She squinted at the dark form silhouetted against the bright sunlight, tidy in a soldier’s white tunic. “Come you inside, sir, the boy will take your horse. The master and mistress sleep in the heat of the day.”

“Then show the way, good maid. King Canute can not hold back the tide by bidding it, nor can Aragon turn back the sun. Hand on my heart, Margaret, I’ll wake your master for you,” said the Prince.

***

**The Second Stanza**

_No, my lord, unless I might have another for working days.  
Your Grace is too costly to wear every day._

In the house’s orchard, a man of middle years and middle height and middle colouring sprawled in a hammock hung between two apple trees, honeysuckle vines twining through the branches above, a soft breath rustling the muslin shading his face as he snored. A woman who matched him for colouring, and exceeded him in beauty, stood over the slumbering form and ripped the cloth away.

“Would you sleep so through the Second Coming, husband?” she said, acerbically.

“I come well for a comely wench,” Benedick grinned sleepily at his wife.

“Then come you to attention. Your former lord is here.”

Benedick shot up in his hammock, then fell in a sprawl of limbs among the plant pots bestrewed around it.

“How now, Benedick, we are well met indeed!” the Prince of Aragon reached down a hand for him, and pulled him up with a clap on the back.

“Light of love,” Benedick sputtered. “It is my own dear prince, Don Pedro, come to visit. Your grace, the very breezes and birds that float on light air should have preceded you.”

“By which you mean,” the Prince said with a smile, “that your intelligencers in Messina have not yet sent word. My army is camped some way without the town. Tis a wise ruler who knows when to bring costs to his friends and when to avoid it.” He gestured at Margaret, her round form disappearing into the house. “Yon oyster is soon to have a pearl of her own.”

“There has been no devil tempting her, your grace, nor dragons in the dark. Naught but a flatterer who talked at her window. But come you, come you, sit at your leisure, it is a weary climb up this dusty hill to this quiet garden.”

The Prince leaned back in his chair, his feet stretched away from him. “God, I am tired to death.”

Beatrice poured him a cup of wine. “Here, your grace, something to wash the dust from your throat. There is a story in your visit, I think.”

“Ah!” the Prince said. “On a far beach lies a fallen ship, its boards bleached white as bone by the pitiless sun, gaping eyes riven in its sides by the merciless rocks of ocean, as hidden and as lethal as a woman’s rage; the black tendrils of dead men’s fingers caress its rended sails.”

“Your words are fair but engimatical, your grace,” Beatrice said with a half smile. “Does this fallen ship have a fallen figurehead, her best days behind her, her hair straggling forlorn in the sand?”

“Women always remain,” Don Pedro replied. “Yes, there was a figurehead, a great lady from France, and in her heart a hidden treasure. This.”

Beatrice opened the oiled document case with a frown. “Herewith is paid to King Charles of Navarre the sum of one hundred thousand ducats, in release of the province of Aquitaine, loaned to France for the pursuance of his wars… It’s a receipt.”

Benedick, impatient as ever, snatched at the paper. “From your brother, the King of Navarre, sir. No, that is, your good father before him before he deeded away that crown. How old is this paper?”

“ _Years_. My brother Navarre is walled inside his hermitage, alone but for his books; the Queen of France, new orphan that she is, camps on his border. One must presume—”

“One must presume much.” The younger man, quick in his movements, forgot the heat of the day and began to pace. “The Queen has to be petitioning for the return of Aquitaine; Navarre by all mercies must be refusing to give it up without payment, and the proof, the proof of that payment lies in your own hands.”

“Proof with the bright spark of gunpowder in’t.”

“Your father the king always did want an alliance with France. But do you take this to your brother and make him owe you for it, or to the ruler of France and gift it her? It would help your interest to have the King of Navarre owe you a favour. And yet, France’s new minted Queen will be seeking out a good marriage… You’ve little affection for your brother Ferdinand of Navarre, you once said.”

“He bloodied my nose when I was ten,” Don Pedro of Aragon said drily. “But blood is blood.”

"King Ferdinand," Beatrice asked. "What is his nature?"

"Verily, a stuffed man," her husband interrupted.

"Stuffed with virtue, wrapped in stuff, or stuffed in a pie?"

"Stuffed with books, and the thoughts within; for yet he has no thoughts of his own, and must mould the stuff of him by the hands of other men." Don Pedro broke off a little twig of honeysuckle and twisted the blossoms twixt his fingers.

"Is he proved, then, with all his kneading?" She smiled as the prince tucked the flowers behind her ear.

"Punch him, and find out." Her husband was hopping about like a baker's apprentice, who'd snatched bread before his time and burned himself for his pains.

"He has proved himself in the wars," Don Pedro added, "and has the talent of keeping men by him."

"And the Queen, what of she?"

Benedick shrugged. "A woman." Beatrice glared at him.

"Graceful and wise, so men say." The Prince elaborated. "But a child when I saw her last, a skinny girl brought out blinking into the realms of majesty by her older brother's death."

"But she graces the courts of rulers with more graces than beauty, they say," Benedick, wise in the ways of politics added. "France did send his only child on embassage, when a courtier might have done."

“Men have one foot on sand, and one on shore,” Beatrice mused, gazing out over the blue harbour of Messina to the boot of Italy far off. “Women remain.”

“This paper is a gift from your dead father, your grace,” Benedick rattled on. “His hand reaches from the grave to help you hold your crown and keep the heart of Aragon sound.”

***

**The Third Stanza**

_And in the managing of quarrels you may say he is wise, for either he avoids them with great discretion or undertakes them with a most Christianlike fear._

As her husband, beloved—if erratic—helpmeet, hopped about like a demented bee, discussing the shiftless alliances that the men of the Mediterranean harangued each other over and felt so proud of, Beatrice curbed her tongue to unaccustomed silence. There was much that might be said of the tides in men's affairs, but Benedick's own choice had been to recede away from his Prince—for her sake. Benedick had chosen their retired life, and said he liked it, but she knew—oh, she knew well—how changeable men could be. Here, in this quiet garden, her marriage had come suddenly to the sticking point.

“Come you now, Benedick, I have missed you in my train. I entreat you to speak well in my embassage, to whomever it please God I should make it.”

“Well,” Benedick demurred. “I am a good Christian man who keeps his garden. And we parted company. Sir.”

“I am the Prince,” Don Pedro said. “I seek a hot-blooded man when I join a quarrel, and a cautious man when expediency resounds to avoid it. Save,” he added wryly, “when my good Christian is visiting the barber.”

And the Prince, too, she thought, come privately, come alone, without witnesses. Here was the humility of princes, who offered their servants a chance to speak frankly. Don Pedro would never apologise for his part in Hero’s downfall, not really; here, now, was the closest he would ever come to expressing regret to his subordinate for the fuss, and bother, and betrayals. And she wondered, not for the first time, how joking had the Prince really been with his casual offer of marriage. She plucked the honeysuckle from her hair and breathed its fragrance.

Benedick’s eyes, lined with too many smiles, grew heavy with grief. “There are bells upon my hat, lord, or mayhap horns.” 

Don Pedro gazed at him, his face unreadable; the good Christian prince whose mother had hailed from the last fragments of Moorish Spain. Suddenly he laughed.

“The bells do ring on a Sunday, jester, but goats do not.” Don Pedro caressed the back of Benedick’s head, then knocked the younger man’s forehead to his own. “Young fool. Marry, marry, and love your wife. I need both your sharp tongues in the years ahead.”

“I have a woman’s heart, lord,” Beatrice said suddenly. “My hands are soft as women’s are, and my sorrows as deep as the sea.”

***

**Envoi**

_In which the Prince must be admonished._

“Your sorrows are a woman’s sorrows,” the Prince replied, “you may keep a hearth and tend it, for you will remain. It is not the way of men, for we must march and shed blood, and guard the honour of our household well.”

“A woman’s honour is her only treasure,” Beatrice snapped. “To shame my cousin with so little evidence…?”

“The insult cannot be let to stand,” Don Pedro said bluntly.

“Not even,” Beatrice asked, an edge as fine as Damascus steel in her voice, “when the insult is to a maid of fair reputation?”

“Fair is as fair words, sweeter than air. Come, would you have me stop the noisome breath of my brother with earth? And your cousin and her affianced husband, and the wine vessel who seduced her maid, and yon lustrous pearl, round belly and all? You put a high price on a maiden’s honour, lady.”

“You are the Prince. Justice flows from you.” Beatrice held his gaze steadily.

“And would I have you as one of my fighting men, blessed lady. I am a Prince with four brothers, who jostle and bite each other. The rights of justice and rule flow only so long as the blades who follow me keep sharp as your tongue.”

Beatrice settled back in her chair; her husband had placed a warm calloused hand at the crook where her shoulder met her neck, reassuring and warming.

“My lady wife fights her own wars,” he said.

“And keeps her own retinue, O holy fool. Will you walk all the weary way to Jerusalem seeking palms for her?”

“Palmers kiss, and wash each other’s feet. It is its own divinity for a fool such as I.”

“Take this palm, thou old fool, my old friend. I have walked a weary way in earth admixed with blood. I would take back my friend if I could.”

Benedick looked warily at the Prince’s outstretched hand, dark against his own fair skin. He breathed out a sigh, inexpressibly weary. “I am a fool who loves his wife. I would walk the world with her, gladly, hand in hand. Without her—I am without.”

“Sail with her to France then, gentle fool,” Don Pedro said, his eyes bright, winking at Beatrice. “I am building my household on rock, and the faith of those who have the heart to tell me when I err.”

Beatrice leaned back against her husband, feeling the gentle pulse of his heart beat and the curve of his fingers around her waist. She drew his other arm up across her chest and kissed his fingers. 

“We go to France.”

**Author's Note:**

> As much as I love _Much Ado About Nothing_ , I also find it a really problematic play, and Don Pedro one of the really problematic characters. So I guess I had to do some relationship building and working through feelings that the play itself cuts short so that I could make it to your happy ending. One of the things that stuck with me when I started thinking about Don Pedro's character is that he's very active in the first half of the play when he's negotiating marriages for his followers and potentially himself (and it's something his father was known to be good at), but he shuts right up when there's a credible threat to his reputation - to be seen as arranging a marriage alliance with a woman about whom there is a doubt of her virtue (whether it's true or not isn't as important is that it's credible). After that he doesn't say much, and he's very reactive to Claudio's actions, and struggling without Benedick around to quietly do some damage control. It got me thinking about a documentary I saw recently that talked about Shakespeare being one of the greats because he shows the needs and values of rulers as intersecting with but different to the needs and values of the more common folk. So that went in, too. I hope it pleases.
> 
> Navarre and Aragon: I have fudged the history and dynasties to fit the story. Navarre at this time was a little kingdom in the Pyrenees tucked between what is now France and Spain. While it had spent part of its history being controlled by its neighbour Aragon, this is quite a bit earlier than Shakespeare’s day. Don Pedro, on the other hand, was in charge of a superpower – not just the ruler of the Kingdom of Aragon, but also a federation of states across the Mediterranean called the Crown of Aragon. On the plus side, I’ve learnt a lot more about the Reconquista in writing this story. ;-)
> 
> The bit about the missing receipt is from _Love’s Labours Lost_ , a lesser known (but fun) comedy, which is on my mind because the Royal Shakespeare Company did an awesome pair of productions with the same cast and overlapping sets. The creative team thought long and hard about how they could get them as close to musical comedy as humanly possible. It’s worth watching just for the cossacks.


End file.
